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Description
When painting an airliner for use in Flight Simulator you usually start off with a "paint kit" provided by the modeler of the original 3-D aircraft. That paint kit contains bitmaps or PSD files or both for you to paint up in the colours of whatever airline you choose to recreate for the flightsim.

In this case the airline is a fictional one of my own creation. A revival of Pacific Southwest Airlines (which merged with USAir in 1987 and soon disappeared).

PSA was known for their "smileliners", every plane had a smile painted on it to emphasize the fun spirit of the airline. It was a great marketing tool. I've brought that back in a "virtual" airline called PSA after the original.

This here is a PSA Connection EMB-170 which does interisland flying in Hawaii, flying between cities like Honolulu, Lihue, Kahului, Kona, and Hilo.

The colour scheme is meant to be a tribute to various airlines of the past. In it you'll find hints of American Trans Air (ATA), Air Florida, and of course Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA). In fact the palm tree on the tail and the swirly sun are exactly the same design that ATA use, which if I had my way, would be restored to the skies in real life as they were colourful and fun planes to look at. Thus my airline incorporates them.

This is a flattened image file for demonstration and would be unusable on the actual plane. The real texture remains layered until its conversion to DXT3 format for use in the simulator. Also this is the full body texture for painting purposes, the next step after this is to cut the various parts of the fuselage (note the "seams") and tail and place them in the corresponding positions in the actual flight simulator texture image.

This aircraft livery is (c) to myself. The livery design was originally created in 1999.

Paintkit and 3D modeled aircraft (c) AI-Aardvark [link]

This aircraft will be used as an AI plane...that is...it won't be flown by me but rather by the computer using a coded schedule/flight plan.

Description
When painting an airliner for use in Flight Simulator you usually start off with a "paint kit" provided by the modeler of the original 3-D aircraft. That paint kit contains bitmaps or PSD files or both for you to paint up in the colours of whatever airline you choose to recreate for the flightsim.

In this case the airline is a fictional one of my own creation. A revival of Pacific Southwest Airlines (which merged with USAir in 1987 and soon disappeared).

PSA was known for their "smileliners", every plane had a smile painted on it to emphasize the fun spirit of the airline. It was a great marketing tool. I've brought that back in a "virtual" airline called PSA after the original.

This here is a PSA Connection EMB-170 which does interisland flying in Hawaii, flying between cities like Honolulu, Lihue, Kahului, Kona, and Hilo.

The colour scheme is meant to be a tribute to various airlines of the past. In it you'll find hints of American Trans Air (ATA), Air Florida, and of course Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA). In fact the palm tree on the tail and the swirly sun are exactly the same design that ATA use, which if I had my way, would be restored to the skies in real life as they were colourful and fun planes to look at. Thus my airline incorporates them.

This is a flattened image file for demonstration and would be unusable on the actual plane. The real texture remains layered until its conversion to DXT3 format for use in the simulator. Also this is the full body texture for painting purposes, the next step after this is to cut the various parts of the fuselage (note the "seams") and tail and place them in the corresponding positions in the actual flight simulator texture image.

This aircraft livery is (c) to myself. The livery design was originally created in 1999.

Paintkit and 3D modeled aircraft (c) AI-Aardvark [link]

This aircraft will be used as an AI plane...that is...it won't be flown by me but rather by the computer using a coded schedule/flight plan.